Conflict-Aware Robust Design for Covert Wireless Communications

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 13 Apr 2026] Conflict-Aware Robust Design for Covert Wireless Communications Abbas Arghavani Covert wireless communication aims to establish a reliable link while hiding the transmission from an adversary. In wireless settings, uncertainty plays a central role in this tradeoff: it can help mask the signal from a warden, but it also complicates robust system design. This raises a basic question: under bounded uncertainty, are reliability and covertness governed by the same adverse conditions? If not, robust covert design cannot be reduced to a single worst-case environment. In this paper, we study this question in a covert wireless model with quasi-static fading, outage-based reliability at Bob and radiometric detection at Willie. Uncertainty is represented through bounded intervals for Bob's average channel strength and Willie's noise power. To obtain a tractable characterization, we adopt a conditional large-N midpoint-threshold surrogate for Willie's detector, parameterized by a Willie-side fading realization. Within this framework, we show that the reliability constraint is governed by Bob's smallest admissible channel parameter, whereas the covertness constraint is governed by Willie's smallest admissible noise level. This establishes a conflict-aware robust-design principle: the adverse realizations for reliability and covertness differ. Based on this result, we derive closed-form expressions for the robustly feasible transmit power and the corresponding robust optimal rate. Numerical results show that bounded uncertainty contracts the feasible region, monotonically reduces the robust optimal rate, and can cause substantial loss relative to the nominal design. Monte Carlo results further show that the conditional surrogate closely tracks the midpoint-threshold radiometer in the intended low-effective-SNR regime. Overall, the paper shows that even in a streamlined wireless setting, robust covert design requires different adverse-case reasoning for reliability and covertness. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Signal Processing (eess.SP) Cite as: arXiv:2604.13122 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2604.13122v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.13122 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Abbas Arghavani [view email] [v1] Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:28:33 UTC (295 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs eess eess.SP References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)